D.H. Lawrence knew ...

" My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our soul and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos "

D.H. Lawrence
(1885 - 1930)

 

But old David Herbert Lawrence certainly should have checked in with a traditional MD to diagnose the tuberculosis that killed him at the ripe old age of 45, instead of blaming his illness on an imbalance between "solar" and "lunar" forces in his solar plexus! But his philosophy of the "thinking body" that he articulates in this quote certainly has merit when applied to TMS.

 

Excerpt from Today in Literature ~ Lawrence was so scoffing of medical (or any other) science that he refused to name or accept his condition, or to submit to any of the "magic mountain" treatments recommended to him. This fatalism was combined with a belief that he was in the grip of an evil spirit, visited upon him by a lifetime of vilification from misguided critics and an outraged public -- most recently for the banned Lady Chatterlies Lover (1928), and for an exhibition of paintings condemned as "filth" by the press and confiscated by the police. "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here, " he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another." (that statement sounds like repression from painful rejection of his lifetime works and TMS settling in his lungs). I just think its so interesting how he ' knew ' ... ​

 

Oh, yes, D.H. Lawrence was a heroic vitalist to be sure! Sounds as though the psychological reinforced the physical, doesn't it? But that's what we all here know anyway from studying TMS theory: Mind and body are inseparable.

 

So true your words... Let no man separate what God has brought together. The mind and body cannot be separated, in sickness and health, for better or worse...till death do us part. I think the grip of an evil spirit on him in the above statement was his ego.

 

This is interesting because my thesis director at San Francisco State, Dan Weiss, wrote Oedipus in Nottingham, which was the first Freudian psychoanalytical study of Lawrence, so I wound up reading a lot of him: Son and Lovers, Women in Love, Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, etc. etc. etc.. Dan said he actually interviewed Lawrence's wife, Freida, in Taos after Lawrence had died and said that even in old age you could sense her great power and passion, things that must have attracted DHL too. Dan was the one who told me that Lawrence had always rejected the doctor's diagnoses and blamed his condition on that lunar/solar imbalance.

 

What a fantastic interaction !

 

Read this ...

After Lawrence died, Frieda returned to the ranch accompanied by Angelo Ravagli, her Italian lover and later third husband. In 1934, she had this memorial built for Lawrence. The following year Frieda had his body exhumed, cremated and the ashes brought to Taos. Her plan was to have the ashes housed in an urn in the memorial but Brett and Mabel Dodge Luhan wanted to scatter the ashes over the ranch (while Lawrence was alive the three women often competed for his attention). In response, Frieda dumped the ashes into a wheelbarrow containing wet cement and exclaimed, "now let's see them steal this!" The cement was used to make the memorial's altar. There are other stories concerning the whereabouts of Lawrence's ashes but this one is the most widely accepted.

 

"Not I, but the Wind!" - D.H. Lawrence

Should have let them blow around the New Mexico desert. Even in death, three women fighting over the deposition of his remains? That guy must have been something else!

 

LOL !! Too funny !! lots of estrogen chasing him around the desert ! What a mental image !